The Big Rip, Bounce Chill or Crunch?

Artists and cultural practitioners have through the ages audaciously conjured thoughts of imagined and possible worlds, cosmological and mythological in nature. Various artistic practices have delved intensely into phenomena beyond the limits of imagination, or drawn inspiration from complex scientific subjects to supernatural and paranormal activities. This action often works remarkably well with the right dose of ambiguity by breaking down traditional models of rational thought.

One fitting example is that of playwright Valère Novarina’s (b. 1942) Le discours aux animaux (1986) which ends with the sentence, “One day I played the horn like this all alone in a splendid wood, and the birds were becalmed at my feet when I named them one by one...”** whereupon he goes on to fully list the names of 1,111 imaginary birds. The vast expanse of imagined species names includes: “pimwhite, sandkill, partch, barnscrub, stiltback, goskit, persill, peeve, phyllist, corntail, perforant, titibit, queedly, jewet, phew, marshquiver, graywhip, corvee, rillard, preem, peterwil, cassenut, flusher, willowgyre, trillet, silverwisp, eidereye, wheeltail, ptyt, jeebill, wheatspit...”****

Another example is the Swiss Art Brut artist Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) with his elaborate cosmologies. In the seven Geographic and Allgebraic Books Wölfli and friends embark on a trip to the stars guided by the “God-Father,” the “Giant-Airplane,” also named “The Giant-Travel-Transparent” with the “Giant-Travel-Avant-Garde.” One of his fabulations was the restructuring of Switzerland and the world: “Eh bien! My last mentioned, most cherished home community Schangnau is now to be rebaptized conclusively with the name St. Adolf-Home.”****

The Big Rip, Bounce, Chill or Crunch? presents works by artists equipped with inspired views on myth-making and future possibilities, who astutely play with the representation of idealized and non-idealized worlds. In doing so they create potential new ideas and highly individualistic mythologies about the polarities between creation/destruction, dis/harmony and dystopia/utopia. Alternatively they break away entirely from such dualisms.

The twelve artists of this specially curated (or hallucinated, mind you) exhibition navigate through ideas ranging from the macro vs. micro, alternative theology, mythical creatures, alien encounters, invented pictographic languages, darkness vs. lightness, total world vs. physical world, entropy and the arrow of time, ancestral tales and personal mythologies.

Throughout the exhibition we may encounter how artists sometimes satirize the supposed magnificence of the agency of humans. In other instances they instill a questioning about our current modus operandi and potentially inspire a contemplativeness on what lies beyond our world. As in the inspiring words of Mike Kelley art reflects but also diffracts: “Art is a mirror – it’s automatically about falseness – and I think art is much better at tearing down than it is at building up.”*****

The title The Big Rip, Bounce, Chill or Crunch? is inspired by the four hypothetical ideas of how the Universe could end. It is thought that we still have between 2.8 billion and 22 billion years from now, but its fate is a topic that is still contested by cosmologists and theoretical physicists alike – but also concerning us all in face of the ecological and climatic concerns of today.******

For press inquiries please contact Linda Jensen at lindajensen@lasttango.info

* Golub, Leon. Cabinet, Trippelganger, Spring 2003 ** As translated by Weiss, Allen S. Cabinet, Ingestion / How to Cook a Phoenix, Summer 2002 *** Ibid **** www.adolfwoelfli.ch/index.php?c=e&level=4&sublevel=2 Accessed on March 25, 2019 ***** p. 131 Kelley, Mike in conversation with Archer, Michael. Speaking of Art: Four decades of art in conversation, London: Phaidon ****** Wikipedia notes that: “The preponderance of evidence to date, based on measurements of the rate of expansion and the mass density, favors a universe that will continue to expand indefinitely, resulting in the “Big Freeze” [also known as Big Chill]…However, observations are not conclusive, and alternative models are still possible.

With special thanks to Kunsthalle Zurich, Christoph Schifferli, Sabina Kohler, Barbara Zürcher and Estate of Klaus Lutz